Kelsey Jackson Williams
Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
by Kelsey Jackson Williams
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 27.2 (Summer 2012): 157-182, © Taylor & Francis,
available online
at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.7227/TSC.27.2.2#.Ux2nZfl_tMY
Abstract
John Aubrey's contributions to antiquarianism and archaeology helped to shape the
development of several disciplines in English scholarship. This paper looks at the
educational milieu that produced his pioneering work, following him from his Wiltshire
gentry background through school at Blandford Forum, Dorset, to Trinity College,
Oxford, the Middle Temple, and beyond as a young gentleman with a scientific turn of
mind in Commonwealth London. It substantially clarifies and revises previous
estimates of the extent and nature of his education and offers a case study in the early
training of a Restoration "virtuoso".
Keywords: Antiquarianism, Education, Oxford, Rota, Science
John Aubrey (1626-1697) is well-known for his contributions to the intellectual
life of the early Royal Society, prehistoric archaeology in Britain, and other
scientific and antiquarian disciplines.1 His education, however, has been
comparatively neglected. Since Anthony Powell’s 1948 biography, there has
been no full-scale study of the young Aubrey within his scholarly contexts.2
Historically, there existed a perception of Aubrey as a dilettante, an amateur with
superficial knowledge of many subjects but who lacked the will, or the ability, to
become master of any.3 While that tradition has been exploded by the work of
Kate Bennett, Michael Hunter, Rhodri Lewis, and William Poole, more recent
studies have focused on Aubrey's major scholarship, rather than its educational
underpinnings.4 This paper explores those underpinnings by reconstructing his
intellectual development up to his election to the Royal Society in 1663. Building
on studies of university education, scientific culture, and the origins of the Royal
Society by Mordechai Feingold, Robert G. Frank, Jr., Michael Hunter, and Charles
Webster, it establishes a more nuanced intellectual biography and places his
education within its larger context.5 Attending to the familial, social, and
scholarly networks in which he moved by virtue of his class, his education, and
his residence, it situates him within the contexts of Early Modern English
scientific and antiquarian scholarship and amends prior assessments of the
extent and nature of his education. In doing so it paints a portrait of Aubrey at
the inception of his major research projects and encourages a reassessment of
his approaches and contributions to individual disciplines. It also delineates the
social and scholarly circles within which he moved in Civil War-era Oxford and
Commonwealth London, networks that played significant roles in the foundation
of the Royal Society and the conduct of scholarship in Restoration England.
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
Wiltshire and School
Aubrey was born at Lower Easton Pierse (now Easton Piercy) in northern
Wiltshire, on 12 March 1626.6 He was the eldest child of his parents, Richard
and Deborah (Lyte) Aubrey. On his father’s side, he was the great-grandson of
the lawyer, M.P., and confidant of Queen Elizabeth, William Aubrey, and cousin to
Sir John Danvers the Regicide.7 However, his grandfather Aubrey was a younger
son and his father, though owning land in several counties, possessed only
moderately substantial means when he married Deborah, daughter and heir of
Isaac Lyte of Easton Pierse. Deborah Lyte’s family were of more modest
background than her husband’s: yeomen and small gentry whose estates were
grouped around the village of Kington St. Michael, a few minutes walk from
Easton Pierse.8 The farm of Broad Chalke in south Wiltshire, where Aubrey
spent much of his early life, had been leased by the Brownes, Deborah's mother's
family, from the Earls of Pembroke and by 1640 this lease had passed from
Aubrey’s great-uncle to his father.9
Aubrey was born into that class of gentry who could boast of ancient
descent and who had cousins in positions of wealth and power, but whose own
resources were more limited. Richard Aubrey’s will disposed of substantial
landed property in Wiltshire, Herefordshire, and Wales, but, by his son’s account,
also left his estate encumbered with £1,800 in debt.10 Aubrey's affluence was
precarious, and would gradually crumble during the course of his adult life.
During his childhood, Aubrey was plagued with illness, including a
potentially fatal fever and a “sicknesse of vomiting” that lasted until he was sent
to school, aged twelve.11 This may partly be responsible for the fragmentary
formal schooling he was given prior to his matriculation at Oxford. In 1634, he
began to study Latin grammar under Robert Latimer, rector of Leigh Delamere,
near Easton Pierse, but Latimer died soon after and the young Aubrey was given
over to a succession of “dull ignorant rest-in-house teachers” before finally being
sent to Blandford School in Dorset, and the care of William Sutton.12 He appears
to have benefitted from his time at Blandford. Despite using Cowper’s Dictionary
as a crib for Terence and Cicero and reading Ovid in Sandys’ translation his use
of Latin in later works such as the Remaines of Gentilisme suggests a good
reading ability of the language.13
Though his formal education was haphazard, Aubrey remembered his
childhood as one of learning and discovery. He began to draw at eight, to paint
the following year, and possessed an early fascination for history, antiquities,
and the natural world.14 He was exposed to Bacon’s Essays at an early age,
though in later life he offers two somewhat different recollections of his first
acquaintance with the book. Either he “mett accidentally” with his mother’s copy
or was advised to read it by Theophilus Wodenote, a clergyman who lived for
two years in Broad Chalke, “being obnoxious to danger of arrests”, perhaps for
debt.15 Wodenote had matriculated at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1606 and
later succeeded his father as vicar of Linkinhorne, Cornwall. He was ejected
about 1645, but his fugitive residence in Broad Chalke must have occurred some
years before that date.16 What little is known of him can largely be inferred from
the two works of his sequestration: Hermes Theologus (1649), a diatribe against
Puritanism and the disorders of the 1640s, and Eremicus Theologus (1654), a
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
collection of aphorisms and advice with a moderate Laudian, Royalist bias. 17
During the two years Wodenote lived in Broad Chalke, he had a significant
influence on Aubrey’s burgeoning intellectual life. Aubrey remembered later
that “[h]e did me much good in opening of my understanding; advised me to read
lord Bacon’s Essayes and an olde booke of proverbs (English); answered me my
questions of antiq<uities>, etc.”18
At his entrance into Oxford, Aubrey appears to have already had a
precocious interest in the natural world in both its historical and scientific
aspects. He himself implies, in his autobiography and elsewhere, that this
enquiring turn of mind owed much to his isolated but happily bookish life at
Easton Pierse and Broad Chalke in the years before and during his time as an
undergraduate.
Oxford and the Middle Temple
On 4 June 1641 Aubrey matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, and he went up
as a gentleman-commoner (the highest social class of undergraduates) on 2 or 3
May of the following year.19 It is not clear if his family had any prior connection
to Trinity, though his cousin, Daniel Danvers, was a commoner there a few years
later.20 His choice may have been determined by the presence of William
Browne, formerly an usher at his old school and soon to be his tutor.21 Browne,
like many Trinity men, was from the South West, the son of the rector of More
Crichell, Dorset, and was only seven years older than Aubrey. He had
matriculated at Trinity in 1634, receiving a scholarship in 1635, was granted his
M.A. on 18 March 1642, and had just entered into his fellowship when Aubrey
came up.22 Aubrey was probably one of his first students, suggesting that their
academic relationship may have been maintained almost without break from
school to university. Another reason for the choice may have been Trinity’s
increasing affluence and willingness to take in the sons of gentlemen, part of a
larger shift in which the university accepted increasing numbers of
undergraduates, often sons of the gentry who never took degrees.23 In any case,
his first sojourn in Oxford was brief. After three months of looking “through
Logique and some Ethiques”, reading Religio Medici and Sir Kenelm Digby’s
response (the former of which, Aubrey remembered as the book “which first
opened my understanding”, suggesting that he may have held it comparably lifechanging to Bacon’s Essays), and hearing his tutor, Browne, prognosticate the fall
of the king, he was summoned home by his father in August, “for feare” of civil
war.24
Some light can be shed on Aubrey’s studies by the account-books of two
brothers, John and Richard Newdigate, who had studied at Trinity as fellowcommoners a generation earlier, before going on, like Aubrey, to the Inns of
Court.25 These accounts suggest, pace Hopkins, a relatively relaxed academic
career, with significantly more outlay on lute strings and silk stockings than
books, and those books bought often being of a recreational nature. 26 The
academic books they did purchase, however, delineate the course of study
pursued in Trinity at that time. Purchases in the first week of term included
Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Pliny’s Epistolae, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Ravisius
Textor’s Epithets.27 Book buying falls off steeply thereafter, but notable later
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
purchases included Bacon’s Essays, Lucan, Masius on logic, Martial, Florus’
Histories, and Theophrastus’ Characters.28
Unlike the Newdigates, Aubrey wrote that his “fancy lay most to
geometry” while at Trinity, a statement borne out by the books he is known to
have acquired there.29 Michael Hunter has suggested that what Aubrey’s library
can suggest about his scholarly interests is “almost always better illustrated by
evidence from his writings and letters”, but despite its fragmentary nature, what
survives of Aubrey’s library, particularly those books with dated ownership
inscriptions, can serve as an illuminating supplement to other sources.30 In this
instance, Aubrey’s claims to mathematical study at Trinity are supported by
several items in the collection of mathematical works which he later donated to
the library of Gloucester Hall (now Worcester College), Oxford. What may be the
earliest surviving book known to have been part of Aubrey's library is a copy of
Robert Record's Arithmetick signed "Jo Awbrey Trin: Coll: Oxon."31 During his
third and final period of residence in Oxford he was also evidently studying
astronomy and geometry as the ownership inscriptions in his copies of Blaeu’s
Institutio Astronomica, Michaelis’ Epitome Astronomiae, and Commandinus'
bilingual edition of Euclid's Elements indicate purchase at that time. By then, he
had graduated from the basic arithmetic described by Record to the geometry of
Euclid and Blaeu's and Michaelis' discussions of Ptolemaic and Copernican
astronomy.32
Aubrey briefly returned to Trinity in February 1643 but was ill with
smallpox in April, and upon his recovery in June was once again sent for by his
father. He recalled this event with regret, writing that “it was a most sad life to
me, then in the prime of my youth, not to have the benefitt of an ingeniose
conversation and scarce any good bookes”.33 His enforced residence in the
country, with his parents and, later, two much younger brothers, continued until
the spring of 1646, when, “with much adoe” he convinced his father to let him
enter the Middle Temple.34
During this second absence from Oxford, William Browne wrote him a
series of letters detailing battles of the Civil War and the worsening of the King’s
cause. The first letters, which appear to date from autumn and winter 1643, are
full of reports of Royalist victories.35 The tone soon changes, however. In the
spring of 1644, Browne bewails the public sufferings and in a letter of 9
September 1645 advises Aubrey not to return to Oxford, but instead to enter the
University of Leiden, it being cheaper and safer.36 In a final letter of 12
November 1646, he assures Aubrey that he will remain in Oxford, despite the
turmoil of the times, and without sacrificing his conscience (Browne was a
committed Royalist).37
Aubrey was admitted to the society of the Middle Temple on 18 April
1646 and bound with a former Trinity man, Anthony Ettrick38 and John Love,
having paid the expected fine of £5.39 As a special admission, Aubrey was
exempt from attendance during the learning vacations.40 There is no mention of
legal studies in his later writings, nor does his name appear in the Middle Temple
records beyond the date of his admission, but by his own account he remained
associated with the Temple for the next ten years.41 At the beginning of his time
there, Aubrey frequented the Middle Temple dining hall and had some contact
with the older lawyers, but it seems likely that, at most, he used the Temple as a
convenient base of operations while in London and nothing more. 42 He did not
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live in chambers, but during his sojourns in London regularly lodged at the sign
of the Rainbow, near Temple Gate.43
That summer, Aubrey remained in London, making the acquaintance of
“many of the king’s party” who had fled Oxford at the surrender of the garrison
in late June. On 6 November, he returned to Trinity, where he “was much made
of by the fellowes; had their learned conversation, lookt on bookes, musique.”44
He lived in “greatest felicity” there and at the Middle Temple until called home a
third and final time by his terminally ill father on Christmas Eve 1648. 45 During
this latter sojourn in Oxford, it is unlikely that he was formally a member of the
college. He does not appear on the lists of Trinity men examined by the
parliamentary Visitors on 4 May 1648, nor in any other college records of the
period.46 This does not mean that he did not follow some course of study while
there, albeit probably largely self-directed. John Lydall, a fellow of Trinity who
became one Aubrey's close friends, writes in a letter soon after his departure
that he assumes Aubrey will continue his "studys" and promises to be "a most
ready & devoted servant" for their execution.47
Lydall's letters of the next few years include greetings from mutual
friends that help demarcate the limits of the circles in which Aubrey had moved
during his time at Oxford. Lydall began to write within days of Aubrey's
departure and it may be assumed that the friends named therein were those
with whom the two men had associated during Aubrey's time there between
1646 and 1648.48 Names in the letters written by Lydall between 1 January
1649 and 10 February 1652 include Bathurst (nine times), Hawes (five times),
Highmore (four times), Douch, How, Proctor, Meese, and Yates (once each). 49 All
of these men can be confidently identified. Ralph Bathurst had been elected
scholar at Trinity in 1637, was a fellow of the college, and at the time of the
letters practiced medicine in partnership with Thomas Willis.50 William Hawes
had matriculated at Trinity in 1636 after going to Edward Sylvester’s school in
Oxford, where Bathurst’s partner Willis was a fellow pupil, and in 1658-1659
was briefly president of the college.51 Richard Highmore had matriculated at
Trinity in 1638, was elected a scholar in 1639, and was fellow and bursar by
1648.52 Douch was probably one of the two sons of William Douch, rector of
Stalbridge, Dorset, who were at Trinity: either John, who matriculated in 1639,
or James, who came up two years later.53 William How was the only one of the
group who was not a Trinity man – he had matriculated at St. John’s in 1637.
Like Bathurst and Highmore, he had a medical background, as well as being a
botanist, and had commanded a troop of horse for the king during the civil
wars.54 Proctor was probably the Thomas Proctor who matriculated at Trinity in
1635 and proceeded B.A. in 1637.55 He does not appear on the Trinity
protestation return for 24 February 1642 but may have remained in the area and
maintained an unofficial association with the college.56 Nicholas Meese had
matriculated at St. John’s in 1645 and was a scholar in Trinity, 1648-1649,
receiving a B.D. after the Restoration.57 Finally, John Yates had matriculated at
Christ Church in 1632, but had migrated to Trinity by the time he was granted
his M.A. in 1639.58 Aubrey seems to have known his father.59 Lydall himself had
matriculated at Trinity in 1640 and appears to have already been a fellow when
he was granted his M.A. in 1647.60
The core members of this group seem to have been Bathurst, Hawes,
Highmore, and presumably Lydall himself. These men were all older than
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Aubrey, had, with the exception of Lydall, joined the college in the 1630s, and
with the exception of Hawes, had known medical interests or were active
medical practitioners.61 It is likely that these were the fellows who "made much
of" Aubrey on his return to Trinity in 1646.62 The one mention of How appears
together with Bathurst, Hawes, and Highmore, suggesting that his medical
vocation may have served as a link to the larger group.63 Little is known about
Yates, but he would have been coeval with the other older men, while Douse and
Meese were closer to Aubrey’s age and seem to have been slighter
acquaintances. Aubrey is the odd man out in this group, all the more so as it
becomes clear that, at least at the beginning of his correspondence with Lydall,
he does not yet know Thomas Willis and lacks detailed knowledge of the other
men’s experiments.64 There may be other, less obvious, bonds between these
scholars, however. Hawes, How, and Highmore were expelled by the university
visitors on failure to submit to the new regime in 1648 and Bathurst, though he
submitted at the time, later protested that he had maintained his loyalty to the
Royalist cause throughout the Commonwealth.65 Aubrey's dislike of the
Parliamentarian leadership was unequivocal and, though no direct evidence of
his political opinions from this period survives, it may be that shared dissident
sympathies joined him to this group of scientifically-minded fellows as much as
science itself.66 Aubrey has been cautiously described as “dissident” rather than
“Royalist” in this context due to his involvement with James Harrington’s club of
republican theorists, discussed below. His later friendship with adherents of the
Parliamentarian cause such as William Petty, Seth Ward, and John Wilkins offers
little insight into his private politics of the 1640s as cross-political acquaintance
within the early Royal Society was the norm rather than the exception.67
What did Aubrey talk about with these dons and physicians? No
direct evidence of his studies during this stint at Trinity survives, but his
correspondence of the following decade, discussed below, allows for an educated
guess.
London and independence
Aubrey divided his time between Broad Chalke and his lodgings in London
during the course of his father’s last illness, perhaps due to the latter’s request
that he “looke after his country businesse and solicite a lawe-suite”.68 While in
Broad Chalke he remained in correspondence with Lydall and exchanged letters
and visits with Francis Potter, another fellow of Trinity with an “ingenious” turn
of mind, then rector of Kilmington, Somerset. These two correspondences
provide the best evidence for Aubrey's scholarly preoccupations during this
time. The fourteen letters from Lydall date from between January 1649 and June
1655, while the nine letters from Potter cover the period between April 1651
and May 1656. Regrettably, the portion of these correspondences surviving
amongst those letters which Aubrey donated to the Ashmolean Museum appears
to represent only a moiety of the original corpus. No figures survive for the
number of letters written between Aubrey and Lydall, but in his life of Potter
Aubrey wrote that he had "all his letters by me, which are very good, and I
beleeve near 200, and most of them philosophicall".69 If this is representative of
the collection of letters to Aubrey preserved in Bodleian MSS. Aubrey 12 and 13,
it forces a note of caution to be sounded in any attempt to reconstruct Aubrey's
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
activities during this period. While he may be presumed to have preserved the
most important (as he saw them) letters for deposit in the Ashmolean, such a
fragmentary body of evidence can only provide the basis for a fragmentary
biography.
Bearing these caveats in mind, the contents of the surviving letters
between Aubrey, Lydall, and Potter suggest an internally consistent plan of
research and study by Aubrey. He appears as the junior partner in both
relationships, soliciting information, asking for advice on books, and allowing his
studies to be guided by the two older men. Notable is the almost complete lack
of references to stereotypically "Aubreian" subjects: antiquarianism, astrology,
or the occult. These are not completely absent -- a letter from Lydall of 11 March
1650 contains a report of the Just Devil of Woodstock -- and other, more
historical, lines of study are suggested by a letter from Lydall of 13 March 1649,
enclosed within which Bathurst sends Aubrey a catalogue of "the writers of the
Saracen history", but these are exceptions rather than the norm.70
This is not to suggest, however, that Aubrey had no antiquarian interests
at this time. He famously recorded that it was in 1654, while staying with his
cousin Sir John Aubrey at his estate, Llantrithyd, that "he began to enter into
pocket memorandum bookes philosophicall and antiquarian remarkes".71 In the
same year he rescued an altar on the site of Roman Caerleon from a workman's
hammer. "I did intend to have presented this draught to Mr Jo: Selden, but he fell
sick”, he recalled, “and never recovered."72 Aubrey's engagement with Selden's
work continued when he purchased, for four shillings, Selden's Jani Anglorum
facies altera (London, 1610) on 11 December 1654.73 Aside from these
instances, however, his antiquarian studies were secondary to his other
"philosophical" pursuits at this period.
Aubrey, in accordance with contemporary usage, used "philosophical" to
mean anything concerned with the pursuit of knowledge, including the physical
and natural sciences. His philosophical researches are abundantly evident in the
letters, which suggest that he was chiefly concerned with mathematics, in their
pure form and as applied to astronomy, navigation, and mechanics (i.e.,
"mathematics" and "mixed mathematics" in Early Modern terminology), with
strong secondary interests in medicine and chemistry.74 He also began a
biographical study of Francis Bacon, but this endeavour, qualitatively different
from his scientific studies, will be considered separately.
An example of the didactic nature of many of the letters from both
correspondences is Lydall’s of 18 September 1649. He explains to Aubrey “the
cause of the hunters moon” which Aubrey “will easily perceive”, if he remembers
“out of Blondevill the difference of the rising of the ecliptique”, i.e., that some
signs of the zodiac rise obliquely, and so more quickly than those which rise
vertically. Lydall then explains the astronomy and apologizes for not being able
to immediately send Aubrey a copy of Pitiscus’ Trigonometry.75 Potter also
contributed to Aubrey’s mathematical education, lending him a book by the same
author as “he who wrote the discourse of the world in the moon”, discussing
gravity with reference to Wilkins’ Mathematicall Magick in 1651, and explaining
a speedier method for obtaining logarithms in 1654.76 At this time, Aubrey was
building a library of mathematical texts. In 1652 he purchased Gaspar Ens'
Thaumaturgus mathematicus and also owned or had read the mathematical
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works of Leonard Digges and an unidentified essay by the mathematician
Edmund Wingate by the early 1650s.77
It was probably in the mid-1650s that Aubrey began to take instruction in
algebra from the mathematician, Edward Davenant.78 They were presumably
introduced through Anthony Ettrick, who had married Davenant's daughter,
Anne, herself "a notable Algebrist", in 1650.79 A composite mathematical
manuscript donated by Aubrey to the library of Gloucester Hall, Oxford, contains
his fair notes on this education in algebra out of Davenant's manuscript treatise,
the Algebra Literalis.80 The eighty-two pages of this document suggest a careful
and systematic approach to learning the principles of algebra and an interest in
both pure and applied mathematics.81 Undated, within the same collection, is a
smaller treatise "of Logorithmes [sic]" which likely relates either to his education
by Davenant or by Francis Potter.82
Much of this interest in mathematics was channeled into a fascination
with inventions, perhaps inspired in part by Potter, whose “genius lay most of all
to the mechanicks”.83 In spring 1649 Lydall thanked Aubrey for "your
description of ye glasse diall" which he has seen “geometrically set down” in John
Wells’ Sciographia.84 In 1651 Potter promised to repay him for his kindnesses
with a "device" of his making and explained the logistics of building both a flying
chariot and a submarine.85 That same year, Lydall wrote of new inventions in
Oxford: William Petty's improved harvester and Christopher Wren's scales and
engine for double writing, mentioning also that he was reading Kircher's Ars
magna lucis et umbrae and quoting various contrivances from it.86 He remarked
that Aubrey may have seen a trick of perspective with a drawing and cylindrical
mirrors in Tradescant’s museum.87 Two years later, Potter gave Aubrey a
gradated compass of his design and promised to supply him with a quadrant of
his making.88 In May 1656 Potter sent Aubrey on a mission in London to search
out a certain type of sheet metal for the better making of the compass.89
Another interest of Potter's which Aubrey may have shared as early as the
1650s was in artificial language. Rhodri Lewis noted that among the subjects of
discussion at Aubrey's first meeting with Samuel Hartlib was Potter's study of "a
common or Vniversal Character", and in December 1653 Hartlib again mentions
that Potter is "about a common-Language to bee written in ordinary
Characters".90 Lewis has cautioned that these references could simply be a
misunderstanding of a form of cryptography, but they could equally anticipate
Aubrey's known interest in the revision of John Wilkins' Essay towards a Real
Character and a Philosophical Language in the 1670s.91
Aubrey was also fascinated by what Lydall described as “the more
scholastick & geometricall part of navigation”.92 This interest presumably went
hand in hand with his several aborted plans to take up various grants of land in
the Americas. Navigation and exploration, as manifestations of a wider interest
in mathematical and descriptive geography, were well known in 1640s Trinity.93
On 5 April 1649, Lydall wrote thanking Aubrey for intelligence concerning the
new plantations. Lydall's brother was going to Barbados, and would, he wrote,
be glad of Mr. Ettrick's company.94 In later letters from the early 1650s, Lydall
passes on a letter from Aubrey to Thomas Mariett in which Aubrey mentions
finding latitude in the dark, recommends Gilbert's De Magnete, but thinks that
Blundeville is more commodious for use, and answers Aubrey’s opinions on the
relative merits of various books of practical and “scholastick” navigation. 95 A
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hint of applied navigation appears in a letter of 22 February 1654 in which
Lydall reports that he has not found anyone "that are for such a voiage as yours",
though, given its timing, this could refer to Aubrey’s projected tour of Italy rather
than a more purely maritime adventure.96
Chemistry and medicine were subsidiary but not inconsiderable topics of
interest in the letters. Throughout the winter and spring of 1649, Lydall
attempted to procure an unspecified quantity of aurum fulminans for Aubrey,
hampered first by the absence from Oxford of Thomas Willis, “our chymist”, and
later by the irregularities of the mail.97 Aurum fulminans, a highly explosive gold
compound, was regularly prepared by chemists in the first half of the
seventeenth century and was sometimes attributed medical properties.98 Its
appearance here, in association with Bathurst and Willis, suggests that Aubrey
was aware of the nature of the experiments being conducted by their circle at
this time, among which appears to have been Willis’ demonstration of its
explosive capabilities.99 Another chemical or geological reference appears in two
letters from Potter of 1655 and 1656 in which he describes the unexplained
growth of a mark upon the surface of an agate, later allowing Aubrey to lend it to
William Harvey for further observation.100
Given the medical interests of Aubrey’s Oxford friends, it is unsurprising
that it too was among his subjects of study. Impetus for this may also have
sprung from his friendship with William Harvey, which appears to have begun
about this time. Aubrey had seen Harvey from a distance during his visit to
Trinity in 1642 but “was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor.”
They became known to each other in 1651, when Harvey was attending Aubrey’s
cousin, Mrs. Montague, in his medical capacity, and at the time of his projected
journey into Italy Harvey “in order to my journey,
gave me, i.e., dictated to me, what to see, what company to keepe,
what bookes to read, how to manage my studies: in short he bid me
goe to the fountain head, and read Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna, and
did call the neoteriques shitt-breeches.101
Harvey became another of Aubrey’s teachers. In a note of June 1655 Aubrey
records a set of queries to ask Harvey on mineral waters, the curative qualities of
whey, and why people recover better from fainting fits on their backs, and in
November of that year Harvey purged him to prevent an abcess.102
The attempts by Potter to establish transfusion of blood are well known.
In letters to Aubrey of November 1652 and October 1653, Potter discussed the
practicalities of transfusion, including the instruments needed.103 In the latter
year, Aubrey had purchased a copy of Sanctorius’ De statica medicina from Lydall
and in the same year Lydall answered a question “in Anatomy” of Aubrey’s by
suggesting that while Riolanus was more accurate, Bartholinus was “easier”.104
Frank does not gloss these authors, but the latter is clearly Caspar Bartholin’s
standard textbook, Anatomicae institutiones corporis humani which Aubrey may
have been familiar with in the Oxford edition of 1633. It is not clear to which
work of Jean Riolan Lydall refers. Perhaps Aubrey’s query related to theories of
the circulation of blood and Lydall directed him to Riolan’s contradictions of
Harvey in his Opuscula anatomica nova (London, 1649). Aubrey was directed to
the work of Bartholin’s son, Thomas, in 1655, this time by Potter, who advised
9
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Bartholin’s Animadversions upon Pequetus (“a new little book”) for details on the
progression of chylus and its emptying into the vein of the neck.105
Aubrey did not limit himself to study during this period, but also began to
make contacts outside of the circle of his Trinity friends and to embark upon at
least one of his major works, albeit in embryonic form. On 2 December 1652,
Aubrey, of his “owne accord”, paid a visit to Samuel Hartlib who recorded an
impression of the younger scholar in his Ephemerides:
Hee seemed to be a very witty man and a mighty favorer and
promoter of all Ingenious and Verulamian Designes. especially
interessed [sic] in Mr Potter the 666. divine . . .106
Aubrey attempted to interest Hartlib in Potter's inventions, and his notices of
Potter’s latest progress appear in Hartlib’s notebooks for the winter of 16521653. Also present, however, is the germ of a new idea. Hartlib noted that “My
Lady Mitton is said to have the remainder of all Verulam's MS. which Aubrey will
labor to get from her”.107 Aubrey’s interest in Bacon had continued during this
period with the purchase of his Historia naturalis et experimentalis de ventis in
1650, his Remaines in 1651, and, in the former year, a biographically informative
visit to Bacon’s old retainer, Thomas Bushell, during the latter’s concealment at
Lambeth.108 He had evidently become interested in collecting Bacon’s
unpublished manuscripts by the time of his meeting with Hartlib. In a letter of 8
March 1653, Hartlib mentions that he has “a piece of Ld Verulam’s, wch was never
yet extant in print”, with the implicit assumption that Aubrey will be particularly
interested to learn this.109 It is not immediately clear what, if anything, came of
Aubrey’s search for Baconian manuscripts at this time, but by 12 December 1655
Hartlib could write to John Worthington that “one Mr. Aubrey an English
gentleman is about to write the Life of that Noble Scholar [i.e., Bacon]. I wish he
may do it to the life.”110 This is almost certainly the extensive life of Bacon which
later appears in Aubrey’s collections for the Lives. It is Aubrey’s first known
biographical attempt and is also of interest because it suggests how his more
literary endeavours derived not solely from acting as research assistant and
dogsbody for Anthony Wood, but out of an independent interest in the
biographical and historical background of the men of science whose works he
was studying at this time.111
This record of study, experiment, and research suggests something more
than the passing enthusiasms of a dilletantish amateur. Although not always
undertaken through conventional avenues, it was a directed, internally
consistent, and wide-ranging attempt to obtain and systematize knowledge of
the new philosophy. Lacking the necessary framework for more than basic
formal education in mathematics and experimental science, Aubrey found his
own tutors – Lydall, Bathurst, Potter, Harvey, and possibly others – through
existing networks of friendship, kinship, and patronage, and embarked upon a
campaign of reading and study as soon as he found himself sufficiently
independent to do so. There can be little doubt that the scholar who in the 1650s
and 1660s began works such as the Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, Monumenta
Britannica, and the Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen was firmly grounded,
less in the philological, humanist tradition often associated with antiquarians,
but rather in the same Baconian tradition of applied mathematics and
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experimentally proven knowledge which influenced the creation and
development of the Royal Society.
Republicanism, Restoration, and the Royal Society
Aubrey's extant correspondence largely ceases between late 1655 and mid-1659,
but whether this indicates a falling off in his friendships with his Oxford friends
or is merely a lacuna in the record is uncertain. One reason for the cessation of
letters was probably the death of John Lydall on 12 October 1657. He was buried
in Trinity College chapel and Ralph Bathurst wrote a fulsome elegy for his friend,
asserting that
No one examined the inner recesses of nature more openly
or sagaciously: no one was more lynx-eyed in mathematics:
no one, through anatomy, botany, or alchemy, more fruitfully laid out the basis of medicine.112
With his passing, Aubrey’s link to the Trinity circle seems to have been broken
and in 1656 he gave up any association with the Middle Temple, leaving him
unoccupied, of independent means, and largely resident in London. 113 At this
time he came into the company of two other men: John Hoskins and Stafford
Tyndale. Hoskins was a fellow Middle Templer with scientific tastes, later both
Fellow and President of the Royal Society, while Tyndale was a neighbour from
Wiltshire who lived in London and was later secretary to Archbishop Sheldon.114
In 1656 the three men viewed an engine for weaving stockings in Pear-poole
lane but throughout this and the following year Aubrey seems to have been more
concerned with love than scholarship.115
This is, however, as likely to represent a lack of information as a cessation
of study or curiosity on Aubrey’s part. In the 1685 preface to his Naturall
Historie of Wiltshire, he recalled that he had “begun” it in 1656, by which he
probably meant that he began to collect materials for it.116 Other evidence of
scholarship during this period includes sustained engagement with Thomas
Willis’ medical writings before and after their publication. Sometime between
17 September and 1 December 1656 Hartlib noted that
Dr or Mr Willis a leading and prime man in the Philosophical Club
at Oxford. Hee hath written a Treatise De Fermentatione and of
Colours much commended by Mr Aubrey.117
The first treatise was the De fermentatione of Willis’ Diatribæ duæ medicophilosophicæ (London, 1659), a copy of which Aubrey acquired upon its
publication in 1658.118 There is nothing among Willis' published works that
could plausibly be the treatise of colours described by Hartlib.119 Aubrey’s copy
of the former has been carefully studied, with underlinings and tick marks in red
pencil throughout, and the end-papers are crammed with Aubrey's notes on
practical medicine, including notae such as “Cloves of Garlick eaten / conduseth
exceedingly to long life / . . . q’. when & how often?” and summaries or references
to the text for ague, itch, fever, and, unexpectedly, brewing.120
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Aubrey bought another book in 1658, strikingly different from Willis’
medical tracts: James Harrington’s Oceana.121 The only annotations in this
volume are corrections of printing mistakes, but both the first three and the last
leaves have been cut out. It was Aubrey’s habit to write notes, observations, or
cross-references on the blank leaves at either end of a volume and their excision
here suggests the possibility of self-censorship.122 It may be significant that the
edition Aubrey purchased was not the 1656 editio princeps, but the 1658 reprint.
Aubrey was to become a friend of Harrington, but the beginning of their
acquaintance seems to have been no earlier than 1658 or 1659, despite the
tantalizing coincidence of the shop of Oceana’s publisher, Daniel Pakeman, “at
the Rain-bow in Fleetstreet”, which was undoubtedly “the Rainbow, a stationer
shop between the two Temple-Gates” where Aubrey roomed during this
period.123 It may be that Aubrey’s residence played a role in throwing them
together.124
Aubrey and Harrington were certainly acquainted by the autumn of 1659,
when Harrington’s “Rota Club” began to meet at the Turk’s Head in New Palace
Yard.125 Its purpose was to propose and debate an alternative model of
government for England and by 20 December of that year its plans were
sufficiently advanced for it to resolve to print a précis of conclusions so far,
which was issued as a pamphlet early in the new year.126 The club’s ideology
was republican and aligned against both the Commonwealth and any restored
monarchy. As Aubrey described it, it consisted of a group of men broadly
considered to be Harrington’s “party”, another group of “auditors” (in which he
placed himself), and a group of antagonists. John Hoskins was amongst
Harrington’s adherents, as were such politically dangerous figures as Cyriack
Skinner, Milton’s pupil, and Maximilian Petty the Leveller.127
It is unclear to what extent Aubrey supported Harrington’s proposals. His
only description of this period, in his life of Harrington, was written long after
the fact and likely represents the wisdom of Restoration-era hindsight rather
than the possibilities available in 1659. Even so, Aubrey wrote that “the doctrine
was very taking” and there is a wistful note in his account of the Club’s last days:
[T]his meeting continued Novemb., Dec., Jan., till Febr. 20 or 21;
and then, upon the unexpected turne upon generall Monke’s
comeing-in, all these aierie models vanished. Than, ’twas not
fitt, nay treason, to have donne such.128
Aubrey escaped the Restoration unharmed, but the danger of being associated
with such an institution is apparent in his excision of the names of Hoskins and
Thomas Mariett from the list of members, adding that they "would not like to
have their names seen”.129 Mariett was Aubrey's bed-fellow during his time in
the Middle Temple and had held treasonable correspondence, first with Charles
II, then with General Monck, during the 1650s. Aubrey recalled that "Every night
late, I had an account of all these transactions abed", suggesting that he was
more than merely a fellow lodger of the dissident.130 There is not enough
evidence to suggest how these episodes fit within Aubrey’s larger political and
ideological life, but they complicate any portrait of him as a doctrinaire Royalist,
seeking solace in science during the Commonwealth, a portrait which was
frequently and self-servingly drawn by many intellectuals after the Restoration.
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In March 1660 Aubrey was in Wiltshire, attending a meeting of local
gentlemen to choose M.P.s for the Convention Parliament.131 An incidental result
of this electioneering was the decision by Aubrey, William Yorke, Thomas Gore,
Jeffrey Daniel, and Sir John Erneley, all Wiltshire gentry, to attempt an
antiquarian “Description” of Wiltshire in imitation of Dugdale’s Antiquities of
Warwickshire.132 The only portion completed of this work was Aubrey’s own
description of the “North Division” of the county, that part including his
childhood home of Easton Pierse. Writing in his preface to this work, he
lamented that he had “not sett downe the Antiquities of these parts” before this
meeting, for many things had since been irrecoverably lost.133 The grammar of
the passage is ambiguous, but seems to indicate that it was only in 1660 that he
began systematically to record antiquarian, as opposed to natural historical,
notes on Wiltshire.
Aubrey’s activities at this time are preserved in the letters sent him by
Tyndale and Hoskins during their trips to Europe in the late 1650s and early
1660s. On 28 July 1659 Tyndale wrote from Alençon, encouraging Aubrey to join
him in Paris in time to see the royal marriage ceremonies there, but Aubrey
seems not to have taken advantage of his friend’s offer, remaining in England
until a brief and unexplained visit to Ireland with Anthony Ettrick in the summer
of the following year.134 Aubrey had been bitterly disappointed at the failure of
his scheme to visit Italy earlier in the decade and this must still have rankled, for
in a letter of 18 December 1660 Hoskins, writing from Rome, feared to tell
Aubrey of its wonders for making him melancholy.135 Aubrey appears to have
been meditating on another continental venture, however, for in a letter of 21
August 1661 Tyndale wrote that
Some vessels are gonne already to Portugall, & others are ready
to transport Sr Richard Fanshaw, as soone as advice comes from
thence, that all things are matured; & if you intend that journey,
you must hasten . . . .136
This refers to Fanshawe’s expedition as ambassador to Portugal from September
to December 1661.137 No other mention of this proposed journey to Portugal,
presumably attached in some capacity to the ambassadorial retinue, appears in
Aubrey’s papers and it must have proved abortive. It is curious, however, that
Aubrey could even be considered for such an official role, given his apparent
dissociation from Restoration politics.
Almost a year before the inaugural meeting of the group that became the
Royal Society had been held on 28 November 1660.138 This organizational
meeting compiled a list of those “judged willing & fit to joyne them in their
design” from which Aubrey was conspicuously absent .139 The first evidence of
any association between him and the Royal Society comes from a letter written
from Venice by John Hoskins on 12 July 1661 in which he wonders that “you tell
mee nothing of the famous Academy of or philosophicall scepticks yt believe
nothing not tryed”.140 There is little to suggest, however, that Aubrey would
have any privileged knowledge of the Society at this time. His name is absent
from the records of the Society at the adoption of the first charter on 15 July
1662 and a letter from Stafford Tyndale of that May chides him for absenting
himself so long from London.141 It was only on 24 December that his name was
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proposed as a possible member by Walter Charleton, a former student of John
Wilkins at Magdalen Hall, who had in the same month given Aubrey a copy of his
Consilium hygiasticum.142 He was elected on 7 and admitted on 21 January
1663.143
The reason for this lapse between the initial organization of the Royal
Society and Aubrey’s admission to membership is probably due to his
comparatively peripheral role in the larger intellectual community. Aubrey was
experienced in mathematics, mechanics, and natural philosophy, but had
remained outside the core groups of experimental scientists whose work
preceded and informed that of the Society. He was more than a dilettante, but
neither was he a pillar of the scientific community. Occupying a liminal position
between virtuoso and more serious student of experimental science, he was like
many intellectually-inclined members of the gentry: inclined towards, and even
experienced in, the new philosophy, but, not an active contributor of knowledge
to the larger projects of the Society and other learned ventures.
Placed within this biographical framework, the genesis of Aubrey’s later
research and role within the Society can be seen to lie precisely within this
“virtuosic” background. Over the remaining thirty-five years of his life, he honed
and refined the knowledge he had acquired in his youth, putting it to use for the
advancement of learning, partially through the vehicle of the Society, but largely
on his own account. Aubrey's life and intellectual pursuits are far better
documented, and far better studied, after the early 1660s, but the above offers an
intellectual biography that may serve as a framework within which to view his
later achievements. As William Poole has recently observed, the better-known
achievements of Aubrey the biographer, the antiquarian, and the surveyor of
Stonehenge should not blind us to the less obvious, but nonetheless important,
achievements of Aubrey the learned observer and practitioner of mathematics
and natural philosophy. Aubrey, though only in the intellectual front ranks
within his preferred discipline of antiquarianism, came from an educational
background also steeped in the practices of the new philosophy.
Aubrey’s career should not, however, be neatly divided into early
“scientific” and late “antiquarian” periods. Nor, indeed, is it useful to distinguish
between “scientific” and “antiquarian” in this context. A scholar like Aubrey, who
could simultaneously read Selden’s Janus Anglorum, collect materials for a
biography of Francis Bacon, and learn algebra, existed in an intellectual sphere
that made no clear distinction between the two. His early career demonstrates
how, under the all-encompassing umbrella of “scholarship”, Aubrey could
investigate the natural history that would eventually inform his study of
prehistoric archaeology and the mathematics and mechanics that would prompt
him to reflect on the history of invention. In microcosm, his education and life
reflect a scholarly world before the blinders of specialisation, when polymathy,
rather than something suspicious, was something to be respected and praised. 144
As such, it offers a valuable corrective to historiographies of science that neglect
its wider context as well as to historiographies of antiquarianism that ignore the
profound influence of the experimental sciences.145
1
Michael Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (London,
Duckworth, 1975) is the standard discussion, to be consulted together
14
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
with William Poole, John Aubrey and the Advancement of Learning
(Oxford, Bodleian Library Publishing, 2010).
2
Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and his Friends (1948; rev. ed., London,
Heinemann, 1963).
3
See, for example, Lytton Strachey’s assessment of Aubrey as “an amiable
muddler” (Portraits in Miniature and other essays [London, Chatto &
Windus, 1931], p. 20) and the derisive criticism throughout John Collier’s
Scandals and Credulities of John Aubrey (London, D. Appleton, 1931).
David Tylden-Wright’s John Aubrey: a life (London, Harper Collins, 1991)
is written in a similar vein and Kate Bennett has demonstrated in a recent
review of Allan Pritchard’s English Biography in the Seventeenth Century
(Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2005) that this tradition of
undervaluation still persists (Review of English Studies, 57 [2006], 803805 ). The blame does not rest entirely at their doors. Aubrey may have
unintentionally cultivated this image, describing himself, after Horace
(Ars Poetica, lines 304-305), as a whetstone that could sharpen others,
though itself unable to cut, which seems to have been taken, incorrectly,
by some as an admission of his own dilettantism (John Aubrey, Brief
Lives, chiefly of contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the years
1669 and 1696, , ed. Andrew Clark [Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1898], vol. 1,
p. 39).
4
Besides Hunter, Aubrey, and Poole, Aubrey, see Kate Bennett, Materials
towards a critical edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives, University of Oxford
unpublished D.Phil. Thesis (1993), soon to be replaced by her edition of
the Lives; Kate Bennett, ‘Editing Aubrey’, in Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and
Anne C. Henry (eds.), Ma(r)king the Text (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000); Kate
Bennett, ‘John Aubrey’s Collections and the Early-Modern Museum’,
Bodleian Library Record, 17 (2001), 213–45; Kate Bennett, 'John Aubrey,
Hint-Keeper: Life-Writing and the Encouragement of Natural Philosophy
in the pre-Newtonian Seventeenth Century', The Seventeenth Century 22,
358-380 (2007); Rhodri Lewis, 'The Efforts of the Aubrey
Correspondence Group to Revise John Wilkins's Essay (1668) and their
Context', Historiographia Linguistica, 28 (2001), 333–66; Rhodri Lewis,
Language, Mind, and Nature: artificial languages in England from Bacon to
Locke (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007).
5
Mordechai Feingold, The mathematicians’ apprenticeship: science,
universities, and society in England, 1560-1640 (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1984); Mordechai Feingold, 'The Humanities'
and 'The Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies', both in Nicholas
Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, Volume IV: The
Seventeenth Century, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 211-448;
Robert G. Frank, Jr., Harvey and the Oxford physiologists: a study of
scientific ideas (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press,
1980); Robert G. Frank, Jr., 'John Aubrey, F.R.S., John Lydall, and Science at
Commonwealth Oxford', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London
15
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
27, (1973), 193-217; Michael Hunter, Establishing the new science: the
experience of the early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Boydell Press,
1989); Michael Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows, 1660-1700: the
morphology of an early scientific institution, 2nd ed. (Stanford in the Vale,
British Society for the History of Science, 1994); Michael Hunter, Science
and the shape of orthodoxy: intellectual change in late seventeenth-century
Britain (Woodbridge, Boydell, 1995); Michael Hunter, Science and society
in Restoration England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981);
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform,
1626-1660 (London, Duckworth, 1975)
6
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 35. His birth would have fallen within 1625 in the
Julian calendar. All dates are given in Old Style but the year is assumed to
begin on 1 January rather than 25 March.
7
Bodleian MS. Malone 33, fo 59v (pedigree of the Aubrey family, from a
manuscript of James Gilpin copied by Edmund Malone); Thomas Wotton,
The English baronetage: containing a genealogical and historical account
of all the English baronets, now existing . . . (London, Printed for Tho.
Wotton, 1741), vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 111; George E. Cokayne, The Complete
Baronetage (Exeter, Pollard, 1900-1909), vol. 3, pp. 93-94; F. N.
Macnamara, Memorials of the Danvers Family (of Dauntsey and Culworth):
their ancestors and descendants from the Conquest till the termination of
the eighteenth century (London, Hardy & Page, 1895).
8
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 3, fo 51r; George W. Marshall (ed.), The Visitation of
Wiltshire, 1623 (London, George Bell & Sons, 1882), pp. 28-29, 56; J. E.
Jackson, 'Kington St. Michael', Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History
Magazine, 4(1858), 71-72.
9
D. A. Crowley (ed.), A History of Wiltshire, Volume XIII: South-West
Wiltshire: Chalke and Dunworth Hundreds (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1987), pp. 40, 44.
10
Public Record Office, PCC Wills, Prob 11/230, fos 129r-130v; Aubrey,
Lives, vol. 1, p. 38.
11
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, pp. 35-36.
12
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, pp. 29, 35-36. Sutton came from a distinguished
family of schoolteachers associated with Blandford School (Alfred A.
Mumford, 'The Suttons, a Dorset race of scholars', Notes & Queries for
Somerset and Dorset, 10[1907], 202-203). Blandford may also have
provided the first point of contact between Aubrey and his future fiancée,
Katherine Ryves. Her father, George Ryves, was buried there, per her will,
and was evidently a member of the learned gentry family of that name
living at Damory Court, Blandford (Powell, Aubrey, pp. 83-84).
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
13
Powell, Aubrey, pp. 40-43. The books mentioned were Thomas Cooper’s
Thesaurus linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ (London, 1573) and George
Sandys’ Ovid’s Metamorphosis (London, 1626), or later editions (for
convenience, publishing data of works predating 1750 has been
suppressed). The Remaines of Gentilisme, Aubrey's treatise on the
survival of Greco-Roman traditions in modern folklore, is now British
Library Add. MS. 72850, fos 100r-243v.
14
Writing of himself (in the third person) he recalled that, “[w]hen a boy, he
did ever love to converse with old men, as living histories. He cared not
for play, but on play-dayes he gave himselfe to drawing and painting"
(Aubrey, Lives, vol 1, p. 43).
15
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 36 (his mother), vol. 2, p. 307 (Wodenote).
16
John Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part I: from the earliest
times to 1751(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1922-1927), vol. 4,
p. 460; ODNB, sub Theophilus Wodenote, which is confused as to the time
of his residence in Broad Chalke.
17
Theophilus Wodenote, Hermes Theologus: or, A Divine Mercurie . . .
(London, 1649); Theophilus Wodenote, Eremicus Theologus, or, A
Sequestred Divine his Aphorisms, or Breviats of Speculations (London,
1654). One or both of these were in progress when Wodenote was in
Broad Chalke as Aubrey remembers their writing, though he confuses the
title of Wodenote’s work, probably the Eremicus, with that of Thomas
Fuller’s Good Thoughts in Bad Times (London, 1646).
18
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p. 307.
19
Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: the members of the University of Oxford,
1500-1714 (Oxford, Parker, 1891-1892), vol. 1, p. 44; Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1,
pp. 37, 46.
20
Danvers proceeded B.A. in 1651 (Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 1, p. 371).
He addresses Aubrey as “cousin” in two undated letters, at least one of
which dates from his time at Trinity (Bodleian Aubrey MS. 12, fos 90r93v).
21
Powell, Aubrey, p. 44.
22
Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 1, p. 198.
23
Clare Hopkins, Trinity: 450 Years of an Oxford College Community, (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 86-92. For the shift from a graduate
to an undergraduate focus and its consequences see Tyacke (ed.), History
of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, passim.
17
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
24
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 37. The story of king Charles’ dream, which
Browne interprets as the animus of London against the king is found in
John Aubrey, Miscellanies (London, 1696), p. 38. Aubrey would have read
the 1642 pirated edition of the Religio Medici. Its sustained impact on his
thinking is attested by the quotations from it throughout his works, e.g.,
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 1, fo 20v. The response was Sir Kenelm Digby’s
Observations upon Religio Medici (London, 1643).
25
Vivienne Larminie, 'The Undergraduate Account Book of John and Richard
Newdigate, 1618-1621', Camden Miscellany XXX (London, Offices of the
Royal Historical Society, 1990), pp. 149-269.
26
Larminie, 'Account Book', pp. 162 (“lutte strings”), 164 (“lute strings”),
171 (“silke stockings” and “silke garters”), etc. Hopkins suggests that the
Newdigate brothers “worked rather harder” than the “haphazard” Aubrey
(Hopkins, Trinity, p. 89). There is some debate as to whether gentlemancommoners were set an easier curriculum than their poorer counterparts
destined for the cloth, cf. Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John
Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008),
pp. 26-47, but Mordechai Feingold has made a strong case for the
similarity of curricula across the social spectrum (Feingold, 'The
Humanities', in History of the University of Oxford, ed. Tyacke, vol. 4, pp.
217-218, 295-296.
27
Larminie, ‘Account Book’, pp. 162-163.
28
Larminie, ‘Account Book’, pp. 171, 178, 193-194.
29
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 43.
30
Hunter, Aubrey, p. 245.
31
Robert Record, Records Arithmeticke: Contayning the ground of Arts . . .
(London, 1615), now Worcester College E.X.5. For Aubrey's library see R.
T. Gunter, ‘The Library of John Aubrey, F.R.S.’, Bodleian Quarterly Record,
6 (1931), pp. 230–36, supplemented and corrected by Anthony Powell,
‘John Aubrey’s Books I, II’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 (20 January,
1950), pp. 32, 48.
32
The texts in question are Eukleidou stoikeion biblia. Elementorum Euclidis
libri tredecim, ed. and trans. Federicus Commandinus (London, 1620),
now Worcester College MSS. 5.4. and signed “Jo: Aubrey Trin: Coll: Oxon.
1648.”; Gulielmus Blaeu, Institutio Astronomica (Amsterdam, 1640), now
Worcester College E.X.2. and signed “Jon Awbrey | 1647.”; and M.
Michaelis, Epitome Astronomica (Tübingen, 1624), now Worcester College
E.X.9. and signed “Jo: Aubrey Coll. Trin. Oxon. 1646”.
33
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 38. That Aubrey’s departure from Oxford was
initially seen only as a temporary measure seems evident from the Trinity
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
caution book, which records £3 caution money paid by Aubrey for the
academic years 1641-1642 to 1644-1645 inclusive (Trinity College MS. II.
C/1, fos 290r-295r).
34
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 38. For his brother's baptisms see Cecil Gurden
Moore, Registers of Broad Chalke, co. Wilts, from 1538 to 1780 [London,
Mitchell & Hughes, 1881], p. 20.
35
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fos 41r-42v, 47r-48v, 49r-50v. fos 41r-42v are
dated 17 December 1643. The date of 47r-48v is probably late September
or early October 1643, assuming it is the first, and not the second, battle
of Newbury that is described, and 49r-50v must date from late July or
early August as it refers to the recent capture of Bristol by the Royalists.
36
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fos 35r-36v, 43r-44v.
37
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fos 45r-46v. Browne was on the Trinity
bursar’s books as late as 1648-1649 (Trinity College MS. Computi
Bursariorum, fo 99v). Sometime thereafter he was preferred to the living
of Farnham in Surrey, which he held until his death on 21 October 1669
(Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 1, p. 198).
38
Ettrick was one of Aubrey’s “amici” and they likely became acquainted at
Trinity. Ettrick matriculated there in September 1640 and was admitted
to the Middle Temple on 26 November 1641, but his name appears in the
Trinity caution book for 1641-42 (Trinity College MS. II. C/1, fo 291r).
He was called to the bar in 1652 and had a distinguished legal career in
the Temple (Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 2, p. 467; Arthur Robert
Ingpen, The Middle Temple Bench Book [London, Chiswick Press, 1912], p.
215).
39
Middle Temple Records, ed. Charles Henry Hopwood (London, Published
by order of the Masters of the Bench, 1904-1905), vol. 2, p. 938. Aubrey
mistakenly gives the date as 6 April (Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 38). John
“Love” is probably to be identified with John Lowe of New Sarum,
Wiltshire, who was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1618 and called to
the bar in 1626 (H. A. C. Sturgess, Register of Admissions to the Honourable
Society of the Middle Temple [London, Published for the Honourable
Society of the Middle Temple by Butterworth, 1949], vol. 1, p. 108).
Aubrey may have known him from Wiltshire.
40
Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts,
1590-1640 (London, Longman, 1972), p. 15.
41
Powell, Aubrey, p. 59.
42
Aubrey recalled a witticism of Sir John Maynard told over dinner in
Middle Temple hall about 1646 or 1647 which suggested some
acquaintance with its senior members (Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p. 203-204).
19
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
43
As evidenced by the directions on his letters. He first lived in the house of
Mr. Bird, a glover, by the Middle Temple Gate (Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12,
fo 45v) but was at the Rainbow as early as 27 May 1651 (Bodleian MS.
Aubrey 12, fo 308v). Chambers were expensive and difficult to come by,
so it is unsurprising that Aubrey chose to live out (Prest, Inns of Court, pp.
13-14).
44
Aubrey's mention of music may be related to the overlap between
musical and scientific circles in the university. Many of his future
associates, including John Wilkins and Anthony Wood, were involved in
the musical circle centered around William Ellis, ejected organist of St.
John's, in the late 1640s and 1650s (Penelope M. Gouk, 'Music', in The
History of the University of Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, vol. 4, pp. 621640).
45
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 38.
46
The register of the visitors of the University of Oxford, from A.D. 1647 to A.D.
1658, ed. Montagu Burrows (London, Printed for the Camden Society,
1881), pp. 35, 551-554. His absence from college records is
unsurprising given the poor state of Trinity’s administrative archive
during this period. No entries were recorded in the caution book
between 1646 and 1660 and no bursar’s accounts were recorded
between 1640 and 1646 (Trinity College MSS. II. C/1 [Liber Cautionum]
and Computi Bursariorum).
47
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 292r. The Lydall-Aubrey letters have been
discussed partially printed in Frank, 'John Aubrey', which remains an
essential reference for their study.
48
The first letter in the sequence is dated 1 January 1649 (Bodleian MS.
Aubrey 12, fo 292r).
49
Statistics derived from letters of John Lydall to Aubrey at Bodleian MS.
Aubrey 12, fos 292r-310v, 319r-v.
50
ODNB, sub Ralph Bathurst; Thomas Warton, The life and literary remains
of Ralph Bathurst, M.D., Dean of Wells, and President of Trinity College in
Oxford, (London, Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, et al., 1761), pp. 34-38.
51
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p. 303; Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 2, p. 675.
52
Burrows (ed.), Register of visitors, p. 551; Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 2,
p. 708. I have followed Frank in his identification of “Mr. Highmore” with
Richard, rather than his brother, Nathaniel (Frank, 'John Aubrey', p. 196).
Nathaniel, though seemingly a better candidate, was already practicing in
Sherborne, Dorset, by 1645 and would likely not have been present in
Oxford (ODNB, sub Nathaniel Highmore).
20
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
53
Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 1, p. 416. Aubrey mentions “Jack Dowch”
in the anecdote of President Kettell’s hour-glass (Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p.
24).
54
Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 2, p. 755; ODNB, sub William How. How
was one of the first botanists to study native English plants, work which
was published in his Phytologia Britannica (London, 1650). He also
edited the Stirpium Illustrationes of James I's "botanographer", Matthias
de l'Obel (London, 1655). See Richard Pulteney, Historical and
biographical sketches of the progress of botany in England . . . (London,
Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand, 1790), vol. 1, pp. 169-74; Anthony
Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (London, Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, et
al., 1813-1820), vol. 3, cols. 418-419.
55
Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 3, p. 1215.
56
Oxfordshire protestation returns, 1641-2, ed. Christopher S. A. Dobson
(Oxford, Oxfordshire Record Society, 1955), pp. 116-117.
57
Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 3, p. 999.
58
Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 4, p. 1699.
59
See Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p. 214, for an anecdote about Sir Henry
Savile told by “old Mr. Yates”.
60
Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 3, p. 952. The names of Bathurst, Hawes,
Highmore, How, and Lydall appear in the bursar’s book under
disbursements to the fellows for the years 1647-1649, while Meese’s
name is listed among the scholars of the college. Lydall, together with one
Mr. Unite, also a fellow, was paid an additional £4 per annum for
unspecified “lectoribus philosophicis” (Trinity College MS. Computi
Bursariorum, fos 87v-88r, 99v).
61
Lydall's kinsman, Richard, was an M.D. and at one time shared a horse
with Thomas Willis, Bathurst's colleague (Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p. 203;
Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 3, p. 952).
62
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 38.
63
How begs to be remembered in Lydall’s letter of 20 February 1649
(Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 296r).
64
Cf. Lydall’s letter of 23 January 1649 in which Aubrey’s friends “desire to
be remembered”, while Willis, whom Lydall has earlier described as “Mr.
Willis our Chymist” “presents his service” to Aubrey (Bodleian MS. Aubrey
12, fo 294r).
21
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
65
Burrows, Register of the visitors, pp. 111, 162, 215, 551; Warton, Life of
Bathurst, pp. 205-206 (in which he also identifies Thomas Willis as a
crypto-Royalist).
66
See Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 291, for Aubrey's opinion of the
Commonwealth: "'twas worse than tyranny".
67
For the politically mixed nature of the early Society, see Hunter,
Establishing the New Science. Poole, Aubrey, p. 25, has suggested that
Aubrey was 'politically tone-deaf', but his association with the Rota
cannot be ignored.
68
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 38.
69
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p. 165.
70
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fos 298r (Saracen history), 306r (apparitions at
Woodstock).
71
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 39.
72
John Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica or A Miscellany of British Antiquities,
ed. John Fowles and Rodney Legg (Sherborne, Dorset, Dorset Publishing
Company, 1980-1982), vol. 1, p. 453. Selden's death on 30 November
provides a terminus post quem for this event.
73
Bodleian Ashmole 1555, signed “Sum Joannis Aubrij é / societate Medij
Templi.”
74
For the distinction between "mathematics" and "mixed mathematics" in
the seventeenth century, see Gary I. Brown, 'The Evolution of the Term
"Mixed Mathematics"', Journal of the History of Ideas, 52 (1991), 81-102.
75
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 304r. “Blondevill” is Blundeville’s Exercises
(London, 1636). Aubrey would probably have used an edition of the
English translation of Pitiscus’s Trigonometrie (London, 1630). This and
other identifications of books from Lydall’s letters are taken from Frank,
'John Aubrey', passim, unless stated otherwise.
76
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fos 141r-142v, 148r. The “discourse” is
undoubtedly John Wilkins’ discovery of a new world, or, A discourse
tending to prove, that ('tis probable) there may be another habitable world
in the moon (London, 1638) and the reference to Mathematicall Magick
(London, 1648) later in the same letter suggests that it may be that book
which Lydall lent to Aubrey.
77
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 304r; Aubrey 13, fos 142r, 148r.
22
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
78
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 201 ("He was very ready to teach and instruct. He
did me the favour to informe me first in Algebra").
79
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 202.
80
Worcester College MS. 5.4., fos 65r-106v, identified on its title-page (fo
65r) as “Algebra Literalis. | Jo: Aubrey. 1659.”
81
The existence of Worcester College MS. 5.4. (now bound together with
printed editions of Euclid and Mercator) was noted by Michael Hunter
(Aubrey, p. 49), but he seems to have thought that it was a miscellaneous
volume of calculations rather than a student's work- and textbook similar
in form to Worcester College MS. 4.9. (Aubrey's record of his lessons from
Nicholas Mercator on William Oughtred's Clavis Mathematicae).
82
Worcester College MS. 5.4., fos 137r-139v.
83
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p. 162.
84
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 300r (Frank, 'John Aubrey', p. 213, for the
identification of Wells’ Sciographia).
85
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fos 141r-142r. Potter was not entirely original.
Cornelis Drebbel had already navigated a submarine-like ship down the
Thames about 1620 and the engines of Salomon de Caus anticipate
several of Potter's ideas. See Rosalie L. Colaie, 'Cornelis Drebbel and
Salomon de Caus: Two Jacobean Models for Salomon's House', Huntington
Library Quarterly, 18 (1955), 245-266, ODNB, sub nominibus, and sources
cited therein.
86
Petty was another member of the Oxford medical and experimental circle
and had taken part in the "revival" of Anne Green the year before, with
Bathurst, Willis, and Henry Clerke of Magdalen. The most recent
study makes no mention of his harvester, cf. Ted McCormick, William
Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2009).
87
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 308r. It is unclear if Aubrey is expected to
know Petty and Wren. The item described is probably the “choice piece of
perspective in a black Ivory case” listed in John Tradescant, Musaeum
Tradescantianum: or, a collection of rarities preserved at South-Lambeth
neer London (London, 1656), p. 42. The several optical illusions that
Lydall described are Propositions IX-XI in Liber II, Pars II (“Ars
Sciagraphica”) of Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, pp. 184187 (Rome, 1646). Aubrey's interest in optics can also be seen in his
ownership of Jean-François Nicéron's Perspective curieuse . . . avec
l'optique et la catoptrique . . . (Paris, 1651-1652), now Bodleian Ashmole G
19, for which cf. Noel Malcolm, 'The Title Page of Leviathan, Seen in a
Curious Perspective', The Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998), 124-55.
23
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
88
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 146r.
89
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 152r.
90
Lewis, Language, pp. 72-73; Poole, Aubrey, pp. 52-53.
91
For the Aubrey correspondence group and their efforts see Lewis,
Language, pp. 188-221 and Lewis, 'Aubrey Correspondence Group', pp.
331-364.
92
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 319r.
93
The Trinity library had a number of geographical texts by the time of
Aubrey's matriculation. For these and the rise of academy geography in
the first decades of the seventeenth century see Lesley B. Cormack,
Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620
(Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 112, 153,
and passim.
94
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 302r.
95
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fos 310r, 319r. The books mentioned in the
undated letter at fo 319r (which Frank, 'John Aubrey', pp. 216-217,
plausibly assigns to the Spring of 1654) are Smith’s Seaman’s Grammar
(London, 1627), Mainwaring’s Sea-Mans Dictionary (London, 1644),
Wright’s Certaine Errors in Navigation, 2nd Ed. (London, 1610), Norwood’s
Trigonometria (London, 1631), Snell’s Tiphys Batavus (Leiden, 1624), and
Gunter’s Description and Use of the Sector, 2nd Ed. (London, 1636).
96
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 315r. About this time Aubrey planned a
multi-year tour of Italy and had progressed enough to compose a draft
will and enquire after traveling companions, but to his “inexpressible
griefe and ruine” his mother “hindred this designe” and nothing came to
pass (Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 39).
97
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fos 294r-302r.
98
Frank, 'John Aubrey', pp. 197-198, 211, n. 22; Webster, Great
Instauration, pp. 390-91. Samuel Hartlib noted that "[aurum] fulminans
or the essence of Gold made vp in balsamum suphuris [is] an other most
soveraigne Medecin for Piles" (Hartlib Papers, 29/5/102A [Ephemerides,
1656]).
99
Willis’s Oxford casebook (1650-52), ed. Kenneth Dewhurst (Oxford,
Sandford, 1981), pp. 28-29.
100
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fos 150r, 152r.
24
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
101
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 300.
102
i.e., drained an abscess. Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 277 (Aubrey’s
queries), MS. Aubrey 21, fo 112r (the purgation).
103
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fos 144r, 147r. Potter, according to Aubrey, had
“invented” transfusion about 1639, taking the idea from Ovid (Bodleian
MS. Aubrey 2, fo 66r).
104
Sanctorius Sanctorius, De statica medicina et de responsione ad
staticomasticem (Leiden, 1642), now Bodleian Wood 850. It is signed
"John Lydall Trin: Coll. Oxon." and "Jo: Aubrey. 1653."
105
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 150r. These "animadversions" were, in fact,
Bartholin's De lacteis thoracis in homine brutisque nuperrime observatis
(Copenhagen, 1652), the first text to describe the actions of the thoracic
duct.
106
Hartlib Papers, 28/2/42B-43A (Ephemerides, 1652); cf. G. H. Turnbull,
'Samuel Hartlib’s acquaintance with John Aubrey', Notes and Queries, 195
31 (1950). This is a reference to Francis Potter’s one published work, An
interpretation of the number 666 (Oxford, 1642).
107
Hartlib Papers, 28/2/49B (Ephemerides, 1653).
108
Powell, Aubrey, p. 297 (the books); Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, pp. 132-133
(his visit to Bushell).
109
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 155r. The manuscript in Hartlib's
possession remains unidentified, though it could have been one of those
published in the posthumous Scripta (1653) or the Resuscitatio (1657). I
thank Rhodri Lewis of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, for these suggestions.
110
The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, Master of Jesus
College, Cambridge, ed. James Crossley and Richard Copley Christie
(Manchester, Printed for the Chetham Society, 1847-1886), vol. 1, pp. 6869.
111
Kate Sarah Bennett, Materials towards a critical edition of John Aubrey's
brief lives, University of Oxford D.Phil. Thesis (1993), passim.
112
Warton, Life of Bathurst, pp. 118-119 (“Nemo ad scrutanda naturae
penetralia aut promptior, aut sagacior: Nemo in mathematicis magis
lynceus: Nemo medicinae fundamenta, per anatomiam, botanicem,
spagyriam, felicius posuit”).
113
Powell, Aubrey, p. 59.
25
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
114
ODNB, sub John Hoskins; Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 230r (Tyndale’s
Wiltshire connections); John Aubrey, The natural history and antiquities
of the county of Surrey . . . (London, 1718-1719), vol. 1, pp. 9-10
(his secretaryship).
115
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 46, vol. 2, p. 32; Powell, Aubrey, p. 83.
116
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 1, fo 6r (“I am the first that ever made an Essay of
this kind for Wiltshire, and (for aught I know) in the Nation; having begun
^it^ in Ao. 1656”).
117
Hartlib Papers, 29/5/102A (Ephemerides, 1656).
118
Thomas Willis, Diatribae duae Medico-philosophicae, quarum prior agit de
fermentatione sive de motu intestino particularum in quovis corpore.
Altera de febribus, sive de motu earundem in sanguine Animalium hic
accessit Dissertation Epistolia de urinis (London, 1659). Aubrey’s copy is
now Bodleian Ashmole D. 65.
119
Wood, Athenae, vol. 3, cols. 1051-1052.
120
From the endpapers of Bodleian Ashmole D. 65.
121
James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (London, 1658).
Aubrey’s copy is Bodleian Ashmole G. 6 and is signed “Sum Jo: Aubrij. /
1658” on the flyleaf.
122
Except for his copies of Hobbes' works, Aubrey's Harrington stands out as
unexpectedly political for his library, see Gunter, 'Library', and Powell,
'Aubrey's Books'.
123
Cf. the title-page of Harrington, Oceana, for Pakeman and, for example,
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 230v, for one of many instances of Aubrey's
letters directed to the Rainbow in the later 1650s.
124
Aubrey also preserved Harrington's Epicurean lyric, 'The state of nature
never was so raw' in his Lives (Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 294).
125
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 289.
126
James Harrington, The Rota: or, a model of a free-state, or equall commonwealth: once proposed and debated in brief, and to be again more at large
proposed to, and debated by a free and open Society of ingenious Gentlemen
(London, 1660). Aubrey’s copy is now tract XXII in Bodleian Ashmole
1065. Poole, Aubrey, p. 25, notes that other members were Robert Wood,
the mathematician, and William Petty, the statistician and natural
philosopher. A high proportion of the Rota -- eleven men out of twentyseven -- went on to become fellows of the Royal Society, though the
deeper significance of this congruity remains obscure (see Anna M.
26
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
Strumia, 'Vita instituzionale della Royal Society seicentesca in alcuni studi
recenti', Rivista Storica Italiana, 98 [1986], 500-523, esp. 520-522, and
commentary at Hunter, Establishing the New Science, pp. 8-9).
127
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 290.
128
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 291.
129
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 1, p. 294. Though Aubrey does not name him as a
member of the club, Tyndale was aware of its existence. On 21 August
1661 he wrote that the latest reversals in Scotland would make “ye
Presbiter and ye Rota laugh” (Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 231r).
130
Aubrey, Lives, vol. 2, p. 75.
131
In a backward glance at Harrington’s proposals, Aubrey described this as
“choosing of Knights for ye Senate” (Bodleian MS. Aubrey 3, fo 10r).
132
Sir William Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire (London, 1656).
133
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 3, fo 10r.
134
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 230r (Tyndale-Aubrey); Brief Lives, i. 47 (the
journey to Ireland).
135
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 188r.
136
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 231r.
137
ODNB, sub Sir Richard Fanshawe.
138
Douglas McKie, 'The Origins and Foundation of the Royal Society of
London', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 15 (1960), p.
31.
139
McKie, 'Origins', p. 33.
140
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 12, fo 199r.
141
Bodleian MS. Aubrey 13, fo 235r.
142
Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for improving of
natural knowledge . . . (London, Printed for A. Millar in the Strand, 17561757), vol. 1, p. 166; Powell, Aubrey, p. 298. Aubrey's copy of the
Consilium (now part of Bodleian Ashmole E 39) is inscribed "sum Jo:
Aubrij. 10br: 1662."
143
Birch, History, vol. 1, pp. 172, 179.
27
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Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey's Education and Early Life
144
The locus classicus is Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor, sive de notitia
auctorum et rerum commentarii . . . (Lübeck, 1689-1692), for which see
Anthony Grafton, ‘The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and
Encyclopedism’, Central European History, 18 (1985), pp. 31-47, and
Françoise Waquet, ed., Mapping the World of Learning: the Polyhistor of
Daniel Georg Morhof (Wiesbaden, Harassowitz, 2000).
145
That is to say, scholars should be wary of “internalist” history of
scholarship combined with an unreflective acceptance of modern
disciplinary boundaries. See Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin,
eds., History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the
History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 10-13, who rightly warn against the
opposite extreme: context empty of any understanding of the scholarship
itself.
28